Category: growing food

Excerpt of an article written by Clarissa F. Dillon, 2003, Past Masters in Early American Domestic Arts, Haverford, Pennsylvania. ALHFAM members can access the full text of this article and thousands more though the A.S.K. database. Not a member? Join today! There are many reasons why some colonial cooks are faced with sites that won't… Continue reading Colonial Cooking: When THEY Won’t Let You Use the Hearth→

Submitted by Joel Johnson When I moved to the Pacific Northwest and began work as an agricultural interpreter at Fort Nisqually, about eighteen months ago, I was eager to learn about the region’s history of indigenous agriculture. I grew up in Tucson, AZ, where recent excavations have uncovered 4,100 years of continuous agriculture near the… Continue reading The Honorable Harvest→

By Jochen Welsch, Old Sturbridge Village Visitors to Old Sturbridge Village routinely ask if, and usually assume, that early nineteenth-century farmers were "organic." Most look perplexed when we answer that no, early nineteenth-century farmers were not organic. The public assumes that agricultural history and organic farming go hand in hand. This reveals a basic misunderstanding… Continue reading The Myth of Our Organic Past→

Another blog post from our President, Dr. Debra Reid: I have heard the most amazing things at the Food History Conference I am attending at the moment. I have heard about how archaeobotanists have studied hundreds of sites in Europe, the Middle East and China to document the transfer of western crops (particularly wheat and… Continue reading Food, Glorious Food→

Here is another post in the series of reports from our President, Dr. Debra Reid as she particiaptes in the AIMA conference in Estonia. July 2, 2013 Shelf after shelf of seed specimens, too old to germinate, may challenge agricultural museum curators. They may exercise their de-accession policies to reduce the number of fragile glass containers and… Continue reading Scenes From the Road, part V→

The latest in a series of blog posts from our President, Dr. Debra Reid: Talking Pork Tomorrow (June 29) I will present a paper on “working animals at living history farms” at the AIMA conference in Tartu, Estonia. This theme runs through several presentations. Today we heard a preliminary report on a survey of working animals… Continue reading Scenes from the Road, part IV→

More images and thoughts from ALHFAM's President Dr. Debra Reid as her trek across Estonia continues.... June 26, 2013 – Gardens at the Estonian Open Air Museum The Estonian Open Air Museum concentrates its efforts on two gardens (based on my observations during my visit on June 25). The museum fulfills its interpretive goal by… Continue reading Scenes from the Road… part II→